Former President Donald Trump called members of the U.S. intelligence community “lowlifes” and suggested that he trusts Russian President Vladimir Putin’s word over theirs.
In a post on his Truth Social website on Monday, Trump referenced comments he made during the infamous press conference with Putin in Helinski, Finland in 2018. At the press conference, Trump said he believes Putin’s “extremely strong and powerful” denial about Russia interfering in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, despite the U.S. Intelligence community’s assessment that Russia meddled in the election under direct orders from Putin.
“Remember in Helsinki when a 3rd rate reporter asked me, essentially, who I trusted more, President Putin of Russia, or our ‘Intelligence’ lowlifes,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
“My instinct at the time was that we had really bad people in the form of James Comey, McCabe (whose wife was being helped out by Crooked Hillary while Crooked was under investigation!), Brennan, Peter Strzok (whose wife is at the SEC) & his lover, Lisa Page,” he continued.
Trump also shared a link to an article about Charles McGonigal, a former top FBI official who was in charge of counterintelligence in the FBI’s New York Field Office. McGonigal was arrested for allegedly working with sanctioned Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska after he retired from the bureau in 2018 and for allegedly hiding payments he received from a former employee of an Albanian intelligence agency while he was at the FBI, CNN reports.
Deripaska was sanctioned for interfering in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
“Now add McGonigal & other slime to the list,” Trump wrote on Monday. “Who would you choose, Putin or these Misfits?”
[Image: Chris McGrath/Getty Images]
